April 29, 2011

The Royal Wedding

So tomorrow. Or today, if you’re reading this in real time. Should I say some words? I guess at this point, making some comment, one way or the other about the Royal Wedding, will be like tears in rain. But I’m not ready for bed yet, and it’s a thing, and I’ve not blogged in a while, so here we are.

Regular viewers will be expecting some cynical screed on the notion of Royal pageantry, or the fetishisation of the wedding ceremony generally. And yeah, while neither of those are strictly my “thing” in any sense, I can kind of see the point of them. Don’t get me wrong, the guy who’s been camping out there since Tuesday is kind of an idiot, but he’s no more of an idiot that someone who did that for a new Star Wars movie or Apple product. Actually, he’s less of an idiot, because you can see/buy those things a couple of months hence.

And yes, if we were a sane society, we’d question more readily why a large portion feel so strongly about it. But we’re not really a sane society and really, by now the Royal family are little more than a strange fantasy exhibition that we wheel out for pomp and circumstance. Of course, they’re human beings with feelings and so forth, but they’re so perpetually in the public sphere that it utterly eradicates any reasonable perception we might have of them, for good or ill. And while it is said that they give this country a sense of history, I disagree – the fact some of our pubs are older than our more successful former colonies is what gives the country its sense of history (to name but one example).

So why the obsession? Well, some of it is a legacy of the British class system: the need to pretend to your “betters”, and that such a notion is worth something. Great film as The Kings Speech was, ultimately the importance of the speech was that the British love being talked down to by people they don’t elect. Geoffery Rush and Colin Firth just also did a pretty nice bromance/Rainman thing in the first two acts of the movie.

Which brings me to the reason I’m even plowing through several hundred words on this. The Media. Not just journalists, although mostly them. The bastards love a spectacle. This year has sent them over the top, and I think they’ve just abandoned all pretense of being a serious and useful part of society, and have just become professional carnival barkers. But with the Wedding, it’s gone beyond parody. Every word of this blogpost could be a differernt hyperlink to some Wedding related nonsense, both approving and disapproving.

But you probably know all this already, and it’s probably also beside the point. So I’ll just say this: Fuck it – Mazel tov to ’em. Hope they’re happy. They look like they might be, and who am I to judge or project? For the me, the Royal Wedding is pretty much like the World Cup Final – I don’t really have a horse in this race, but if I’m around a TV at the relevant time, I’ll probably tune in to see the final outcome. The biggest objection I’ll have is to the quality of the commentary.